Jude Kirton-Darling was looking forward to spending a bit of time with her toddler Natan this spring. Although the north-east Labour MEP remained disappointed about the EU referendum result, she thought it would be nice to be a full-time mum for a while.

But Theresa May’s failure to get a deal through parliament means Kirton-Darling finds herself on the stump again instead of going to playgroup. “If you had told me three years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you,” she said. “As MEPs we see the Brexit process very, very closely from both sides and I have never seen such incompetent negotiations.”

Back in 2014, when she was first elected to the European parliament, Labour took two of the three seats available in the north-east, winning 221,988 votes. Ukip got the third, with 177,660. The Conservatives missed out, getting 107,733 votes in the region. Nationally, Ukip sent the most MEPs to Europe (24), followed by Labour (20), the Tories (19), Greens (three) and Lib Dems (one), with gains for regional parties in the devolved nations.

Five years on, the landscape has changed entirely for Labour. It has a new leader in Jeremy Corbyn, it has lost two general elections and found itself in the awkward position of trying to please a set of core voters who want diametrically opposite things. Balancing on this tightrope is particularly fraught in areas once classed as Labour heartlands that voted strongly to leave, such as Sunderland and Stoke-on-Trent, represented by MPs who believe Brexit will leave their constituents worse off.

Sunderland voted 61.3% to leave the EU. The Labour MEP Jude Kirton-Darling was not expecting to be on the stump again this year. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Writing in the Guardian last week, Bridget Phillipson, the Labour MP for Houghton and Sunderland South since 2010, went against official Labour policy – which advocates a general election over a second referendum – and said another vote on Europe was the only way forward. “It is unforgivable to mislead the working people who our party was founded to represent,” she wrote. “I will not tell my constituents that leaving the EU will make them more prosperous, more equal or more free.”

Sunderland, which has been represented exclusively by Labour MPs for 55 years, voted by 61.3% to leave the EU. Polling from Hope Not Hate and Best for Britain last November suggested two out of Sunderland’s three constituencies would now very narrowly back remain, but that was before Nigel Farage put the cat among the pigeons and announced his return to frontline politics.

A ComRes poll on 9 May suggested it would be a two-horse race nationally between Labour and Farage’s Brexit party, with a projected 27% and 26% vote share respectively, followed by the Conservatives on 14%, the Lib Dems on 11%, Change UK on 8% and Ukip with 3%.

Getting his dinner at the chip shop on the Witherwack estate, George Tighe, 58, said he would be voting for Farage. “What everybody voted for was they wanted less immigration. Did they get it? No. We voted not to stop it but control it, to stop people coming willy-nilly … We just want our traditions back.” In the last census, in 2011, 98% of Redhill residents said they were born in Britain, but Tighe said he was worried the area would become “like London or Birmingham, full of foreign people”.

The next customer, Brian Heskett, a retired gravedigger, said he’d be sticking with Labour. “I voted to stay in Europe, mostly so that we could continue transporting goods across the border,” he said. “Labour keeps people in work.”

In Stoke, which voted 69% to leave, there was little to offer hope to Labour. Huddled under an awning across from the city’s library, friends Prasad Gini, 43, and Dave Pegg, 61, were in agreement: the European elections would be another opportunity to signal to national politicians that they felt betrayed on Brexit.

Both leavers and traditional Labour voters, they said they would be voting for the Brexit party. “Britain needs to paddle its own canoe and that’s why so many people voted for Brexit,” said Pegg, a former security guard and taxi driver. “Yet it looks like it’s not going to be delivered. So, like in the local elections, Labour will do badly again because they have been involved in this betrayal. Like Farage has been saying, this country is going to be in one hell of a mess if we don’t leave, so this is our chance to give some power to the people who will make Brexit happen.”

Gini nodded. “Politics is all about fiddling the system. They haven’t done what they said they would on Brexit – but we need to leave so people will vote for other parties so that it happens.”

In March, Labour launched its local election campaign in Stoke, having lost the council to a Tory-City Independents coalition in 2015. But the manoeuvre backfired and the party ended up losing five seats, with the Tories gaining eight. The Stoke North MP, Ruth Smeeth, described it as devastating, saying the party had suffered as a result of the impasse over Brexit. Privately, Labour knows it will struggle even to repeat the result of the last European elections in the West Midlands, when Labour and the Tories came out with two MEPs apiece and Ukip three.

Matthew McNamee and Luke Harrison in Witherwack will probably vote Labour – but Harrison would back the Greens if they had more of a chance. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Doreen Tomkinson, 78, said many people had spoiled their ballot papers at the local elections, crossing out names of party candidates and scribbling in the word “Brexit”. “There is a lot of anger about the mess that we are in. Most people I know just want the government to stick to leaving the EU so, yes, many will vote for the Brexit party,” she said.

Back in the north-east, Kirton-Darling said that after knocking on thousands of doors her “strong guess” was that the majority of Labour voters in the region voted to remain in 2016 and more would do so in a second referendum. Whether they will turn out for her on 23 May is not clear, but she wants to steer them away from Brexit, talking about workers’ rights rather than the withdrawal agreement: “This isn’t a referendum. What happens with Brexit will be decided in Westminster by our MPs.”

Waiting for a bus in Witherwack, Matthew McNamee, 24, and Luke Harrison, 20, said they would probably vote Labour, though Harrison said he’d plump for the Greens if they had a better chance in the region. In the local elections the Green party won its first ever Sunderland seat, ousting Labour in Washington South, but it would need a miracle (and about 150,000 more votes than last time) to send an MEP from the north-east to Brussels.